‘Interstellar’: The Cinema of Physicists

The Earth is a dying dust bowl where a blight is destroying all the crops and oxygen. Schoolchildren are being taught that the moon landings were faked to bankrupt the Russians, and NASA is a secret agency consisting of a dozen scientists huddling underground. The Yankees are a barnstorming troupe who play games in cornfields and let ground balls go through their legs.

This is the world of “Interstellar,” the space thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, of “Inception” and “The Dark Knight” fame, and written by him and his brother Jonathan, that hit theaters in a tsunami of publicity this month.

I’ve been looking forward to “Interstellar” ever since I first heard back in 2006 that physicists led by the celebrated gravitational theorist and Caltech professor Kip Thorne had held a workshop to brainstorm a science-fiction movie. This would be the movie that finally got things right.

The movie stars Matthew McConaughey as an astronaut named Cooper, who leads an expedition to another galaxy in search of a new home for humanity, and, stars among others, Mackenzie Foy, who grows up into Jessica Chastain, as his daughter, Murph (named after the law), who is mad that he left. On one level, it is a heroically realistic tale of space exploration. On another level, it’s a story about father-daughter relationships, as well as a meditation on the human spirit and what happens when humans take their eyes off the stars. But it’s also about quantum gravity and the mysteries of the fifth dimension, and even an astronaut who was at a screening with me confessed that he was confused.

The first time I saw it, I too was confused, and disappointed. Aside from a wonderful view of Cooper’s spacecraft dwarfed by lonely blackness down at the corner of the Imax screen as it passed by a magnificently glowing Saturn, and tense docking sequences similar to certain scenes in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” it was short on the magic and the delicious storytelling twists I expect from the Nolan brothers.

The second time I saw the movie, clued in by Dr. Thorne’s new book, “The Science of Interstellar,” I enjoyed it more, and I could appreciate that a lot of hard-core 20th- and 21st-century physics, especially string theory, was buried in the story — and that there was a decipherable, if abstruse, logic to the ending. But I wonder if a movie that requires a 324-page book to explicate it can be considered a totally successful work of art. The movie’s pedigree goes back to Carl Sagan, a Cornell astronomer and author.

In 1980, he arranged a blind date between Dr. Thorne and Lynda Obst, a good friend and self-admitted “science geek” who later produced “Contact” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” among other films.

They dated briefly and then became good friends. In 2006, they wrote an eight-page treatment for a film about a crew of astronauts, including Stephen Hawking and a romantically attached assistant, who travel through the universe and slightly backward in time by way of wormholes. Out there, they encounter a race of advanced five-dimensional beings who live outside of our own space-time and communicate with it and us only by gravity.

After the Caltech workshop, Jonathan Nolan rewrote the story, and Christopher Nolan rewrote it again after he took over from Steven Spielberg as the director. As a result, Dr. Thorne said, the final screenplay bears little resemblance to the original story he and Ms. Obst wrote.

In the movie, a wormhole, presumably built by some advanced alien race about which we know nothing, has opened up in space out near Saturn. It goes to another galaxy where scouting expeditions have identified three promising planets orbiting a giant supermassive black hole. It is Cooper’s job to check out those planets.

As executive producer, Dr. Thorne had the job of keeping the moviemakers from violating any known laws of physics, his criterion for acceptance being “something serious physicists would at least discuss over beer,” as he put it in an interview.

His book, he stressed, represents his interpretation, and not necessarily the director’s, of what happens or could have happened in the movie, a sort of scientific back story. “A large fraction is stuff I discussed with Chris,” he said.

Dr. Thorne said he had almost always been able to find a way to accommodate Mr. Nolan’s ideas. Luckily, as he said, “There is a lot of leeway beyond the frontier.” At one point, director Nolan asked for a planet on which the dilation of time because of immensely powerful gravity was so severe that one hour there would correspond to seven years on Earth — an Einsteinian effect that plays a big role in the plot. Dr. Thorne’s first reaction was “no way.” But after thinking about it, he says he found a way, which would require the planet to be very close to a massive black hole spinning at nearly its maximum rate. The hole would spin space around with it, like a mixer swirling thick dough.

The planet could get its heat and light from the disk of heated material swirling around the hole, Dr. Thorne calculated, as long as the hole was not feeding too strongly — a rather carefully tuned but not impossible situation. The black hole itself sprang directly from Dr. Thorne’s equations, and its renderings by the movie’s visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin, showed details that Dr. Thorne plans to write papers about.

Wormholes are another thing that easily pass the beer test. Einstein himself pointed out that such shortcuts through space-time were at least allowed by his equations, but nobody knows how to make one or to keep it from collapsing, or how to install one near Saturn without its gravitational field’s disrupting the entire solar system.

Ditto the fifth dimension, a logical consequence of various brands of string theory.

But not everyone drinks the same beer. So some scientists and science writers — not all of whom have had the advantage of reading Dr. Thorne’s elaborate explanations — have paid the movie the ultimate compliment: taking it seriously enough to subject it to a kind of public peer review. The blogs and other forms of science media have bloomed with criticisms.

“Some might say, ‘Why quibble? It’s just a movie'” said David H. Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., and a participant in the 2006 workshop, who complained of sloppy planetary science in the movie. Even with a voracious blight, he said, it would take millions of years to draw down Earth’s oxygen.

“So why did they take care with relativity but not even bother with planetary science?” he went on. “Arthur C. Clarke is spinning in his stargate!”

As a moviegoer, I have a high tolerance for artistic license and wild ideas. As long as it was in space in this universe, the movie worked for me. It was on either end, on Earth and in the fifth dimension, that “Interstellar” goes off the rails.

It is hard for me to imagine, for example, a discredited and underground NASA able to launch rockets to another galaxy, scouting expeditions through the wormhole, spending trillions of dollars without anyone knowing. This crew should give secret-keeping lessons to the N.S.A.

Nor does it seem plausible to me that there seems to be about one theoretical physicist left in the world, who happens to be Professor Brand (Michael Caine), Cooper’s old teacher and NASA’s leader. All the hundreds of string theorists now filling college chairs have gone away despite the discovery of that wormhole and the fifth dimension, confirming the wildest ideas of string theory, which would be worth a handful of Nobel Prizes — unless they too, have gone underground.

As for the fifth dimension, too much of the critical action happens there, where none of us have ever been, at the behest of those mysterious “bulk beings” who built the wormhole, presumably to save mankind. Who are they? Cooper speculates that they are humans who have evolved, but it doesn’t matter. We never see them. For the purposes of the movie, they could be Norse gods, angels, Superman or whoever made the monoliths in “2001,” a wild card the Nolans can play at will, a deus ex machina, in other words. That’s cheating.

If they’re so powerful, why don’t they stop the blight? Or fix up a planet in our own solar system? Nor are the planets in that other galaxy all that impressive. One of them has tsunamis a mile high, the other has clouds of solid ice (Dr. Thorne has admitted wincing when he sees that). And who really wants to live next to a hungry black hole? Compared with this, Mars looks pretty good.

After traveling the universe of “Interstellar,” I’d rather stay home.

Correction:

The Out There column on Tuesday, about the movie “Interstellar,” misidentified the city and state in which the Planetary Science Institute is located. It is in Tucson, Ariz., not in Boulder, Colo.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Interstellar’: The Cinema of Physicists. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe